Special session underway

Florida lawmakers will meet in special session today for a fast fix of congressional districts that a Leon County circuit judge said were unconstitutionally tilted by Republican legislative leaders to protect the state’s GOP majority in Congress.

Senate President Don Gaetz, who chaired the Senate redistricting committee when the stricken lines were drawn in 2012, denied Wednesday that the Republicans had cheated. He said he expects swift agreement on revisions of two districts — the meandering Jacksonville-Orlando tract of U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown and the Central Florida area represented by Rep. Daniel Webster of Winter Garden — in time for submission to Circuit Judge Terry Lewis by the end of next week.

“The judge held intact 25 of 27 congressional districts and specifically rejected the request of the plaintiffs to hold eight districts unconstitutional,” Gaetz said. “We ought to take seriously and literally what the judge has said and we ought to adjust the lines and cure the flaws in Districts 5 and 10 with as little chaos and confusion elsewhere in the state as possible.”

House Minority Leader Perry Thurston, D-Plantation, said the Democrats would like to use some time in the special session to ask the Republicans how their supposedly “transparent and open process” resulted in a state with slightly more Democrats than Republicans having a congressional district of 17 GOP Congress members and only 10 Democrats. Lewis ruled July 10 that Republican leaders “made a mockery” of a 2010 constitutional amendment forbidding consideration of party membership, incumbency or other partisan factors.

“I would love to see an explanation from the leadership of exactly what went on,” Thurston said. “This is going to be an effort to say, ‘Here are two maps, let’s go home,’ but I think we need an explanation of how this could happen.”

Thurston said “they had a concerted, secretive, alternative method that violated the Constitution.”

Testimony in a two-week trial before Lewis last spring indicated that Republican campaign consultants received some proposed congressional maps days or weeks before they became public and that powerful leaders held GOP-only meetings of members and staff. There was also testimony about disappearing email messages and changes in maps surfacing mysteriously late in the discussions.

The leadership was accused of packing Democrats into the serpentine, meandering district represented by Brown, a black Jacksonville member who has been in Congress since 1992, while grafting more white conservatives into the district represented by Webster. The result, in Brown’s case, was to take liberal Democrats out of surrounding districts held by Webster and other Republicans.

The League of Women Voters of Florida and a coalition of individual plaintiffs sued, saying the Legislature violated the “Fair Districts Florida” constitutional amendments voters overwhelmingly approved in 2010. Those amendments — one for the state Legislature, the other for Congress — require districts to be as compact as possible, respect city and county lines as best they can and not favor or handicap candidates on the basis of party membership or incumbency.

Gaetz, R-Niceville, and House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, who chaired the House redistricting committee, opposed the petition initiative that led to the constitutional amendments — saying the mandates were unworkable. But both men testified before Lewis that, once the amendments were passed by the voters, they scrupulously obeyed them in drawing the district lines.

The state House and Senate districting was not challenged in the suit.

After Lewis struck down the districting on July 10, the legislative leadership said it would not appeal his ruling but wanted to conduct the 2014 elections using the current maps. The plaintiffs objected that doing so would deprive voters of having legitimate districts to elect their members of Congress and would, effectively, reward the Republicans for cheating.

Lewis last Friday ordered the Legislature to show him a new map by Aug. 15, the same date that Secretary of State Ken Detzner and the 67 county elections supervisors are to brief him on how they propose to go about holding special elections. Absentee ballots for the Aug. 26 primaries have already been mailed and thousands have been returned by military voters overseas, but some of those voters will inevitably find themselves in different districts once the lines are moved.

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho and Ron Labasky, the Tallahassee attorney representing the state association of elections supervisors, said the counties will have to wait to see what the Legislature does — and whether Lewis approves a new plan — to determine what happens next. Lewis last week said he would hold a hearing Aug. 20 if either side wants one, to challenge and defend whatever the Legislature produces.

Deirdre Manab, state president of the League of Women Voters, said the plaintiffs will have their volunteers and legal staff out in force to watch the special session.

“We want constitutional maps, maps that fully comply with the requirements laid out by Judge Lewis in his ruling,” Macnab told the Tallahassee Democrat Wednesday.

To avoid the kind of collusion that Lewis disapproved of, when the current map was prepared, Sen. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, and Rep. Richard Corcoran, R-Trilby, the redistricting chairmen, ordered legislative staff aides not to talk with members of Congress or their representatives about pending changes in the maps. Corcoran advised that any members offering a new districting plan should be prepared to identify anyone involved in preparing it, as well as the source of population and voting-history data.”

Galvano directed staff “to refrain from discussing their map-drawing efforts with anyone outside the Legislature,” except for legislative lawyers, and not to show proposed maps to any outside interests. Galvano also filed a “shell bill,” containing the existing district lines, to use as a vehicle for amendment in the session.

The House and Senate convene at noon for opening formalities, including introduction of the bill and referral to the remapping committee. The redistricting committees will meet jointly from 2:30 to 6 p.m. for a briefing on Lewis’s order and available options.

The Senate committees will meet Friday to approve bills, set for debate on the House and Senate floors on Monday.